SOME LIMITS ON US: KENNESAW STATE'S FIRST FBS MEDIA DAY
A CUSA Football Kickoff that could've been a press release.
For most conferences this side of the Power 4, media day ends up being a complete waste of time and resources. You can truthfully learn more about a team by firing up College Football 25 than you can by tuning into most of the press conferences that fill up TV and streaming airtime during the late summer.
Conference USA’s lack of identity and continuity helped Kennesaw State get an FBS opportunity, but it didn’t exactly provide the most useful, coherent experience at CUSA Football Kickoff on Tuesday. Instead, you end up with what amounts to an industry networking event for CUSA staff and “college football dignitaries,” where they will hold 11 siloed press conferences without any common ground and make coaches pose in front of insane dorm room (?) backdrops. These media day events are just trade shows for people with Teamwork Online accounts.
Did anyone actually learn a single thing about their favorite football team on Tuesday?
Nearly the entire CUSA press corps cover their local team and nothing more, with varying degrees of homer advocacy. Coaches and players are hit with leading questions so writers can throw some quotes in their predetermined story and move on. National outlets aren’t going to really cover the league on the field; they will focus on the palace intrigue of conference realignment. Chris Vannini from The Athletic showed up because he was already in the Metroplex for AAC Media Days, and also to keep getting access as a friendly face when CUSA commissioner Judy MacLeod needs to push a narrative.
When CUSA’s local journalists are unleashed on the general public, you’ll see moments like Liberty writers asking Jamey Chadwell when his QB Kaidon Salter would “get the respect he deserves.” This hard-hitting question came a few days after Salter, already the reigning CUSA POTY, received the same preseason honor for 2024. An excellent use of everyone’s time. CUSA’s own moderator ends up asking more questions than any of the assembled media in Frisco or online.
There’s never follow-up, clarification, or much room for critical thinking. On Tuesday, Brian Bohannon got a question about his two transfer quarterbacks, but nothing about the presumed starter. Nobody at the presser wanted to know a single thing about how schemes will change under three new coordinators or any specifics on the offensive line. Sidney Porter, in attendance alongside Bohannon, was the only one of the four Owls from the All-CUSA preseason watch list to get any mention. It’s worth tracking down a replay or reading the MDJ’s report if you want a quick hit of football in your bloodstream. Thanks to a coachspeak masterclass from Bohannon, you won’t learn much if you’ve checked in on Kennesaw State football at any point in the last year.
CUSA’s coaches weren’t at media day to talk football, though. They went to Texas as another stop on the campaign trail, all the way down to the lapel pins.
Clearing the low bar set this Talkin’ Season by head coaches elsewhere, Bohannon’s stump speeches didn’t endorse drunk driving or use strange acronyms to talk about his player’s Size, Toughness, and Instincts. He didn’t call anyone a grand wizard, either. Kennesaw’s first and only head coach stuck to the message like a seasoned politician talking about the “awesome league and awesome opportunity” that CUSA provides.
“It’s unique, it’s challenging in all areas,” Bohannon said. “What a great opportunity for us to go brand our program, brand our university on national TV representing Conference USA. We’re awfully excited, our community is excited, and our fan base is excited.”
Fact check: All true, but it would be nice to dig a little deeper during a rare extended media appearance from Bohannon and an Owls team that’s mostly ignored by local sports coverage in Atlanta. CUSA staffers would’ve needed to waterboard Bohannon live on ESPN+ to get any significant info from him on this year’s team, which is a major win for the SIDs.
Along with the usual recruiting points, the Bohannon Party’s 2024 platform revisited a few key words throughout the press conference and CUSA’s studio show: Tough, Challenging, Unique. It’s clear that the PR staff’s main objective during media day prep was to temper any particular on-field expectations about his team’s FBS debut. Bohannon even batted away a question about Jacksonville State and Liberty as past rivals, focusing solely on the Gamecocks instead of putting himself in a spot where he could come close to presenting the -200 CUSA favorite as a program on equal footing.
TLDR: We’re just happy to be here.
Football-wise, not a whole lot happened during the half hour or so that Bohannon, Porter, and Michael Benefield faced the assorted media. The Owls will keep trying to Run the Damn Ball with zone read principles and a lot of RPOs when they do throw. Believe it or not, we also heard some rumblings of being multiple and fast on both sides of the ball. The preseason poll puts the Owls in an unfamiliar spot: picked last in a conference for the first time since the inaugural season in 2015.
Bo’s most revealing soundbite popped up in both media appearances, sounding like a throwaway line until you consider the subtext:
“This is probably a three-to-five year process to get things the way you’d like to have them.”
Equal parts optimistic and problematic, signaling multiple times that Owls fans are facing a lengthy build sounds great in theory. The cautious outlook works well for a 2024 season in which the Owls are near unanimous picks at the bottom of the league. You want coaches thinking big picture as they make those day-to-day decisions. If the odds are against you for a particular season, you can underpromise and overdeliver to make three wins sound heroic.
Calling the KSU football program a “three-to-five year, at minimum, build,” however, is a quote begging for a follow-up question that’ll never come at an event like this. Where, exactly, does Bohannon want to go and what progress has been made since announcing the CUSA move? It’s either self-preservation from Bohannon or messaging from KSU that’s wildly out of step with how college football functions in 2024. We don’t have five years to arrange chess pieces while moving to FBS, especially not in a league where Jacksonville State came in and competed from Day 1. We’ve struggled enough to get people in the stadium while things are going well on the field. Being a noncompetitive bystander CUSA for any longer than a year certainly won’t fix any of those attendance or fan engagement issues.
“You can’t do that overnight,” Bohannon said. “You have to incrementally find ways to get wins along the way.” That’s inarguable, but nobody suggested that’s what needs to happen. We’re almost two years from CUSA announcing the Owls as the league’s tenth member in October 2022, and even longer since NCAA cut block rules forced Bohannon to alter his preferred offense. No aspect of the transition is happening as a surprise, and it’s never been easier in the sport’s history to turn a team around in a hurry. 25 miles down the road, Georgia State lost their head coach 24 hours into spring practice. Two months later, the entire perception of the program has changed with Dell McGee at the helm. What’s going to take five years in Kennesaw?
Kennesaw AD Milton Overton is on record saying the department hopes to break ground on the 50,000 square foot football performance facility next spring, as part of the recent multipurpose capital campaign that’s already brought in nearly $30 million for athletics. It’s tough for the head of the department to hype a rousing success on the fundraising front while the coach goes to media day and asks for a five-year on-ramp to get up to speed in CUSA.
If it’s talent supposedly holding the Owls back, we’ve seen four national signing days and a wide open transfer portal since the FBS move went public. The 247 Composite average for Owls recruiting classes in that time: 167th in the country, just a few spots away from where JMU and Jacksonville State stood heading into their FBS debut last year. If NIL is the barrier here, make that known. Our only collective is either ineffective or the only such group in the country that succeeds in private. They’ll also block you for asking questions about the viability of soliciting $25,000 donations via Shopify. But if a cohesive NIL vision is a determining factor in this supposed five-year plan, there hasn’t been any sort of coordination between the Owls Collective and athletic department to highlight that as an urgent area of need.
Until the KSU athletic department defines a long-term strategy and what qualifies for those incremental wins Bohannon discussed, we’re left to use on-field wins and the good vibes of our FBS transition as the only measures of success. We’ve already been cautioned by the guy in charge against expecting much of the former, and there’s a very limited shelf-life on the latter if results don’t follow.
Once the presser opened up to questions from Zoom reporters, one of the Delaware beat writers jumped on to ask Bohannon about the biggest challenge among finances, facilities, and getting the right talent, presumably to prepare his readers back home as the Blue Hens deal with the same FBS transition next year.
Bo’s knowing smile throughout the question told it all: He can’t predict the future, but he sure knows how much of a “heavy lift” the Owls are still facing.
“All of the above.”